Monday, January 26, 2009

Strout's Kitteredge Is a Finalist for the NBCC Book Award for Fiction

Congratulations to Elizabeth Strout, whose story collection, Olive Kitteridge, is among the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards. (Of course, we're pulling for it to win.) The other four books are novels: Roberto Bolaño's 2666, Marilynne Robinson's Home, Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project, and M. Glenn Taylor's The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart. It's good to see that a university press is also in the mix (the publisher of Taylor's novel is West Virginia University Press).

Olive Kitteridge is an excellent collection and one of The Story Prize's other notable books of the year. It also made a lot of 2008 best books lists, second only to Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, according to our unscientific tally of mentions.

About The Story Prize and this blog

The TSP blog features guest posts from authors whose books have been entered for The Story Prize (an annual book award for short story collections), along with news about the prize and coverage of our annual event.

The finalists for books published in 2018 are A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley, Your Duck Is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg, and Florida by Lauren Groff. The authors will read and discuss their work at an event at The New School on March 6. At the culmination of the event, we will announce the winner. Tickets are $14.

2019 submission deadlines are July 15 for books published Jan.-June, and Nov. 15 for books published July-Dec.

About Me

I've been been the Director of The Story Prize since Founder Julie
Lindsey and I initiated this annual award for books of short fiction in
2004. Before that, I was series editor for six volumes of The O. Henry
Awards (1997-2002) and edited four other anthologies.